The Russian Rivals: The Most Coveted Prize / The Power of Vasilii
International bestseller Penny Jordan’s RUSSIAN RIVALS novels: Two ruthless men… Two vulnerable women…THE MOST COVETED PRIZERussian tycoon Kiryl has one rival, who has a younger, over-protected half-sister, Alena… Kiryl’s master plan is to seduce the tantalisingly beautiful Alena, then use her to blackmail her brother. It’s a winning situation for the Russian, until Alena discovers just how ruthlessly Kiryl has been using her…THE POWER OF VASILIILaura Westcotte is the only suitable candidate for the job as Russian millionaire Vasilii Demidov’s PA, but Vasilii is far too cynical ever to trust a woman – particularly one with a dubious reputation… Desperate for work, Laura must impress her chillingly complex new boss, but the magnetic power of her attraction to him terrifies her!
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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
PENNY
JORDAN
presents
The RUSSIAN RIVALS
Demidov vs. Androvonov
Let the most merciless of men win …
THE MOST COVETED PRIZE
THE POWER OF VASILII
PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, unfortunately passed away on 31st December 2011. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. Penny wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.’ It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterisation that helps to explain her enduring appeal.
Contents
ALENA had known she wanted him—quite desperately—the minute she’d seen him. That had been in the foyer of this London hotel earlier in the week. The fierce surge of previously unknown and unexpected sheer physical desire that had struck had been so powerful that it had almost literally knocked her off her feet—and left her in no doubt as to its meaning or its urgency, shaking tremulously from head to foot and on fire with the force of her own desire.
He was, she suspected, everything that her elder half-brother Vasilii had so often warned her against in his own sex. He was dangerous; she knew that—any woman would know it, even if Vasilii tried to treat her as though she was still merely a girl and not a woman.
Alena sighed. She did genuinely and really love Vasilii, even if he was the most aggravatingly old-fashioned, moralistic and over-protective brother anyone could have. However, there was something about him which drew and compelled her beyond reason, beyond duty, beyond anything and everything she had ever known or expected to know. Had she been struck by love? Had she been struck by its darker sibling lust? Or perhaps a combination of both? Was it her passionate deep-running Russian blood that was responsible? Or was it a vulnerability to wickedly dangerous Russian men she had inherited from her English mother, who had fallen so swiftly in love with her own Russian father?
It didn’t matter. What was happening to her was beyond the skills of analysis drilled in to her to fit its pupils for the modern age by the teachers at her all female and very strict school. Nothing mattered other than the gathering, growing rushing need that now owned her. His air of openly raw sexuality and her need to offer herself up to it, to be consumed by it, filled her senses, leaving no room for anything else. Just the thought of even breathing the same air as him was enough to send her dizzy with delight and to make her body react as erotically as though he was already touching it, caressing it, taking it and touching it, teaching it and her everything that it meant to be a woman.
Alena shuddered in mute acknowledgement of his mastery of her responses. Any minute now he would turn and see her, and recognise the effect he was having on her. Her heart gave a fierce bound of mingled anticipation and apprehension. Oh, yes, he was dangerous—and she ached for it, hungered for it, craved it.
She might ‘only’ be nineteen, as Vasilii was so fond of reminding her, but she was more than old enough to know from the one tremulous, daring glance she had risked earlier in the week into those malachite-green eyes—so matching in colour the awesome columns of malachite in St Petersburg’s Winter Palace—exactly what the man now standing engaged in conversation with another Russian on the other side of the exclusive hotel’s even more exclusive lounge lobby was. He was living, breathing, walking sexual danger—especially to a woman like her. He lived outside convention and its rules.
Her pulse beating increasingly speedily, she studied him covertly and eagerly. He was tall—as tall as Vasilii, who was six feet three to her own five feet nine. He was also slightly younger than Vasilii, she suspected. Perhaps in his early thirties, whereas Vasilii was now thirty-five. His thick hair was a rich tawny brown, reminding her of the colour of one of Vasilii’s hunting jackets, although this man’s hair was in need of a cut to bring it to the kind of order Vasilii favoured.
